Nicholas Evans-Cato
Courtesy of the Artist
Nicholas Evans-Cato (Rhode Island School of Design, BFA 1994, Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., MFA 2003) was born in Brooklyn in 1973. He is currently represented by the George Billis Gallery in New York City, and his work has been featured in the NY Times, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Sun, and on PBS, NY1, and WBAI. He has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, as well as New Jersey’s own E.D. Foundation. His work is in the collections of The Museum of the City of New York, The NY Historical Society, as well as numerous private and corporate collections. He has taught drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design since 2005, and has previously been on the faculty of Pratt Institute, Princeton University, the Jerusalem Studio School, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
He has written:
Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas can easily frame the everyday. But my task is to trap the exceptional. Whether I am outside on site, or in the studio working from memory, painting is a personal, idiosyncratic process founded in obsession, and wonder.
My subjects are genuine locations. They all have names, and many have familiar and private associations. But my attraction to a particular street or building often comes, in part, from a suspicion that it is also, in a sense, nameless. I nurture enduring relationships with a terrain. But for me, a particular motif resonates when it seems eligible for a larger catalog of spatial forms. My paintings are less portraits of Brooklyn than pages in an expansive, borderless inventory of space and light. Their index-like titles and typically symmetrical or balanced compositions intend to hint at something of the monumental, appropriate to a classifying program.
It is neither the landscape’s planning nor its architecture which conjures the shapes I paint. Rather, it is its observation; it is how a place appears that forms a distinct typology. At street level, tight, box-like canyons of space offer motifs best captured in a square format, while aerial, panoramic views from a rooftop invite me to explode them in a wider canvas. When looking around to frame a wider view, the optical distortions of curvilinear perspective weave parallel lines into trajectories mirroring the dome of the sky. And on a clear day, the path of the sun traces analogous curves across it. Only turning achieves a panoramic view, and sky and street are themselves revealed as events. At times, glare, fog, rain and snow are also deliberately organizing factors in my choice of standpoint. I wait for and design with all of them.
Land maps posit an objective viewpoint. But star maps are simply precise drawings made from Earth’s orbit. The Constellations are mnemonic tools which gather together otherwise unrelated stars for the purpose of giving recognizable shapes to an empirical measure of time. Likewise, framing architectural geometries inside four corners requires witnessing. In the dark an apple is not green. Time and light render the American vernacular something fragile, less an anchor than an apparition. I am sustained by its silence, and its modesty.
